Raison d'etre
by UnagiKeki
Summary: Orihime and Ulquiorra, prisoners of the Hueco Mundo and their own weaknesses. A series of one-shots, all UlquiHime, all the time. Occasionally rated T.
1. Stand Off

**A/N: The UlquiHime obsession...it begins. :D**

* * *

Call her crazy, but Orihime has heard things that nobody else has. From the earliest, sun-spotted memories she posseses (_My mind is mine_), she can select the ones where so vividly she heard the calls, the things people thought were safe in the zenana of their mind. The bruised face of the playground ruffian; the grasping, dead-eyed version of her soulless brother; she hears their intention, and what their facades of bitterness hide. She hears the heart of the one who think they are heartless, because they've buried their memories of love and kindness under a desolate landscape of bitterness.

Ulquiorra's mouth is moving, but she can hear the things that this cold-faced brute doesn't dare to feel.

* * *

Being inside has never bothered her like it has now; she is constantly at the large window, with it's stalagmite bars, praying herself into the distant, endless sands of the Hueco Mundo. There's nowhere to run, but she'd still like to; she wants to escape this vessel of a castle, a gourd full of darkness. There are days and nights that blend together, and times that the impossible hope of Ichigo saving her is as real to her as the revelation of a faithful zealot meeting their god. She sees him on the horizon one day, but the longer she looks, the sooner he turns into the scowling form of a sand-battered, white-skinned pilgrim from the grim world outside.

She envies his empty green eyes, that have seen so much. He is free to walk from this place; he could take her with him, if only she can remind him that he has a heart.

One day, he carries through on his threat to force food down her throat. With one hand he grips her chin and neck, and with the other forcefully pecks something tasteless, something to save her life into the nethers of her throat, no matter how she chokes. She is seeing spots, is limp by the end of the meal.

Screw that, she thinks.

* * *

Stockholm Syndrome. Orihime tries to bat her eyes at him, tries not to lose herself. She must save herself, she decides- she is done being dependent. She prepares to give herself over to this harlequin captor, lowering her neckline and her pride by minute centimeters.

It is the day that she shrugs her gown down over the curve of her shoulders and turns to look pryingly at him that Ulquiorra slaps her. There is wildness and blood in her mouth, and Orihime wants to tear his face off in desperation. Instead she lies on the ground with head hung, the spectre of Ulquiorra's thin, white hand still curved around the now-absent roundness of her cheekbone. Without a word of remonstration (without an utterance of "whore", a glare that would have leveled her had she looked up), the black-and-white succumbi strolls back into the perpetual darkness of the hall outside, coattails swaying.

This place is a mad house.

* * *

He is always watching, so it doesn't surprise her at all to come bobbing out of the depths to find him by her side. She keeps her eyes closed as his long, thin fingers stroke her cheek, his black fingernails sleeping threats against her ashen skin. She lies in fear of what will happen if she opens her eyes- and so she does, to destroy the hold that the what-if held on her brain.

His eyes speak in a way that they don't in the day. She can hear it clearly; his buried fossil of a heart, talking to her, crying out, streaming out through his skull. He doesn't stop petting her cheek; he doesn't stop staring into her eyes, even when she finally shifts under his hand. He finally cups her chin, as if appraising her for purchase. Cattle. Property. A resource. He has Aizen's guise, but the heart of something entirely his own.

She wants to kiss him, not out of the crazy lust bourne of months indoors, but to fulfill his fear that she is not really there at all. He is telling her how much fear he has that he and the world are transient, and he secretly doubts that hatred is the only possession available to him. He wants what Orihime has: a hope of escaping this grim, grim expanse of loveless desert.

* * *

**A/N: Oh, my god, what fluffy trash... I'm trying to get better in touch with emotions in writing, since I'm so rusty at it, so let me know...**


	2. A LOT Of Translation Errors

**A/N: The theme of isolation is really digging at me recently. Hope I'm pulling off the theme right...**

*** EDIT: I love all languages, I meant no disrespect to the French; the French have great architecture. Please excuse my earlier comment about the 'nuances' of French verb conjugation... and thanks a bunch to Waka, for helping with my grievous translations... **

* * *

There is lot of time to pass in Las Noches. Orihime would go crazy with no stimulation, and so she protests in the only way she can: arms crossed, she parks on the floor of her cell with one of her cell bars in hand, and waits for Ulquiorra to realize that she is on the edge of plunging the sharpened end of it through her gut.

"I want some books," she orders the shell-shocked, midnight form in her door, as politely as she can. There are no pleasantries in this place; you get what you want or you don't, and death is absolutely, resolutely final. Ulquiorra's job is to keep her alive, and her display indicates to him that he has a fight on his hands; it's easier to give in to her once, and let her quietly understand that this is no tool she can use repeatedly. Orihime gets a random stack of five books the next morning, wrapped in a bag made of fabric softer than anything she has ever felt on earth. There are wonders in this world, but also terrors that the books can distract her from.

Orihime has no idea where he got the books, or if Ulquiorra even reads- but then, she really doesn't care. There's a dictionary, a book of baby names, a history of English ships, and, strangely enough, an erotic paperback; he must have figured she'd like the sultry silhouette of copulating bodies on the front. The last book is a French primer, an ancient textbook with moth-holes in the front. Well, it's better than nothing-

Time means nothing here. Orihime has absorbed every book in the stack, and is reading the last, scant pages of the textbook before she knows; she does the activities and exercises in her head like calisthetics, trying to purge her loneliness and the gluttonous fear that's ebbing in her stomach. She thinks of the stories from her childhood, the scary ones Tatsuki and she shared under the covers, the tales Sora made up to lull her to sleep at night, and translates them, slowly, into French. Soon she can tell herself them silently, feeling the thrill of the stories anew because she's hearing it for the first time again. Her vocabulary grows; she starts to think in broken French, and finally in full sentences. From a basic verb chart Orihime builds a scaffolding to support her life in this dank, fear-filled castle; in the glottals and fricatives, she finds a hidden strength.

"_âne_," she mutters one day as the Inquisitor removes from her chambers, having ignored her suggestion that he procure her more books. _Ass_. He actually stops and turns to face her, stunned; Orihime can't help herself. She holds the book up and smirks, raising one eyebrow triumphantly. 'Yes," Ulquiorra says, as if to himself. "Yes," he says again, and bustles away. What a weirdo, Orihime thinks. _Étrange_

She tells the story of a brave, carrot-top prince who rescues a fair maiden from the clutches of an evil, ire breathing dragon named Ulquiorra and laughs. She touches her lips to see if she can still feel Ichigo's kiss, sleeping though he was; she buries her face in the soft bag and weeps, one day, murmuring, "_Sauvez-moi, je vous en prie que quelqu'un_  
_m'aide-"__- _Save me, somebody please help me-

She finally stops, still sobbing, her eyes stinging and the knowledge of how futile her existence and her cries for help in another tongue are. She is so absorbed in the grief that she doesn't notice Ulquiorra's presence until he speaks, his lanky form disappearing around the corner of the hall which her cell sits at.

_"Que je puisse être votre ton sauveur, vous/toi, belle, tragique créature..."_ he has muttered.That I could be your savior, you beautiful, tragic creature…


	3. Visitors In The Night

_Sometimes, I feel like I could…_

Moth wings fluttering; chasing the trace of radiance from a single candle, a suicidal insect with nothing to lose slams itself against the netting, sewn in iron, that cages Orihime in from the world.

A white hand zooms up, and whacks the flittering form into oblivion.

"Hey, there was a poem in that!" she sniffs, drawing closer to the bars of the window."He's the first face I've seen all day!"

"Sorry," a huffed voice replies. "The sound was making me crazy…" He is struggling to find an overhang by which to support his long, supple body. She spies his black eye, the endless iris of it and the pit of eternity that cannot separate them. There's a comfort in knowing that life is not something discarded in one passage of the bleak moon over a human lifetime; I mean, every girl dreams of living forever with the one they love. Would Ichigo find her, even in the timeless eons that follow when their souls pass on?

"Ichigo…I can't stand it here."

"You say that everytime I come here, Inoue-san."

"And then I ask you when you're going to take me home," she murmurs smilingly, cocking her head to investigate deeper into that bottomless, marmalade gaze. He nearly slips; she hears him skirt back, his gasp at the sudden loss of footing. She knows how it feels…but to be here and to be his, strangely, is almost worth the endless days of silence, of the glare of the barren white desert. "Your voice sounds a little better… are you getting over that cold? Did Yuzu make you some soup?"

"Ah, yes, she did… or maybe just laying eyes on you has helped me."

"So you have been back to the Human World?"

"Yes- everyone is fine," he assures her. He can hear her closing her eyes, the breath leaving the chest he knows is taut every day, even when he comes to calm the fears that roam, wild rhinocerouses, in the expanse of what she cannot see and feel. Orihime could not be more like a flower transplanted from their world, into this cruel one; and yet she stoically watches for him every day, asks of these people she loves with such a soul as he has never experienced. This is why he loves her, and this is why he risks everything to sneak to her window in the night. In this world of soulless ghosts, they have found one another.

"Tatsuki?"

"She's fine," he replies. The candlelight catches on her eyelashes, blinking like gaudy Christmas lights; they beckon him in, to reach out and touch the porcelain hand lain against her budding chest.

"Mizuho?"

"Just as well."

"Rangiku-san?"

"Busty as ever."

"What about Chad and Uryu? It seems like it's been ages… are they coming back to help you?"

"No," he whispers, light as moth wings. "They've abandoned you. They said it was hopeless, and they went home. But I couldn't- I can't let you go, no matter the threat. I'd risk my life for you every day…"

The world she looks out at (the black crack in the wall, his high cheekbone and the grim, reaper's eye that stares back at her, set in obsidian, unflinching-) is blurred by a single tear, a sentimental waste of water in the desert; but Orihime is overflowing, inside of this steel cage, and she wants him to break down this wall, shatter this window and save her; she wants him to never stop looking at her like this.

She wants him every minute of every day… but there is only so much one man can be.

"Take me home… please…"

"I can't-" he begins, but for the first time she cuts him off.

"No, Ichigo- I love you! I can't stay in this place another minute! My heart breaks every time you leave- if you can sneak in and out, why can't you take me with you!"

There is a long silence, unperforated by the cry of insects. Ichigo is holding the world in his palm, her fever-fire eyes holding everything in this world and beyond that he was meant to know.

"… You wouldn't want to come with me. Not me."

"Ichigo, we don't have time for this nonsen-"

"What do you love about me!" he snarls, a question barely blanketing a desperate plea; her fingers release the metal strip that hangs between their faces, everything mollifying. Now it is he who needs comforting.

"… I love your heart most of all: how you leap to the aid of someone who's hurting, how you throw yourself into combat and training… You are a person who has to conceal so much to protect others, and yet you never complain. I love your strength. Things have made you the person you are now, horrible things- but you've become a hero instead of letting being orphaned rule you. I love _everything_ about you…"

"Even my secrets?"  
"Even your secrets," she prays. She brushes her fingers against the gap, inviting him to reach out, once and for all, to touch her and bridge this connection that seems beyond life and death.

… He does.

She shrieks when the pale, spidery hand snakes out and pats her own, the necrotic fingernails of an inverted, unholy being; her mouth is wide with horror as someone sweeps down from above and blows her phantom away. He doesn't even try to dodge the kick; he simply lands in a heap one story below, crumpled and crumbling. The light screams onto him, casting the white of his reanimated flesh shadowed against the sunless sand.

"Well," Kaname concedes, stepping into the harsh circle. He slams his foot against the man's face once more, to pin him to the ground like a helpless moth. Ulquiorra flinches, but has no strength left to fight his way out of this. To be purposeless is one thing; to be completely repulsed is yet another. To be turned down, declared unacceptable and a demon of wrong intent- these are a few more.

"Seems like Rapunzel's prince won't be mooning at her tower for much longer," this sightless apparition declares, unsheathing his blade. One clean cut; one declaration; one swat ends the loveless aught and anger, struggling in vain to seek, through the smallest crevice, the warmth he deserves.

Just like a moth, Orihime thinks as the blade comes down on Ulquiorra's pale neck.

Could they find each other again- would they be Fated to,


End file.
